July 27, 2014

Markdown

I have never been a fan of the heavy UI for writing. I find tools like Word distracting, and yet a simple text editor doesn’t have enough power to justify the time in creating content that will require you to go back and format it when your done.

The majority of my content is created initially for:

Email

White papers

Blogs

Wikis or online notebooks

If the content created becomes valuable enough, it will ultimately end up as a DITA topic for reuse in some future structured creation.

I have been looking for a markup language that will allow me to quickly support the various uses and evolution of my content without formatting distractions during creation. The Markdown language was created in 2004 with the goal of allowing people to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, and optionally convert it to structurally valid XHTML.